By Felicity Arbuthnot.
“Get some new lawyers.” (1999: Then US Secretary of State
Madeleine Albright to UK Foreign Secretary Robin Cook on his assertion that the
bombing of Balkan States was illegal under international law.*)
On this sixteenth
anniversary year of Madeleine Albright stating her endorsement of half a
million child sacrifices at the altar of the UN Embargo on Iraq as a “price
worth it”, this silent holocaust is to be commemorated annually.
In
New Haven, Ct., on 12th May, marking the day of Albright’s infamous broadcast (i) a banner was unfurled and a minute’s silence
held as the Middle East Crisis Committee, the Council on American-Islamic
Relations (CT), the Tree of Life Education Fund and We Refuse to be Enemies,
inaugurated the first Iraq Genocide Memorial Day.
Stanley
Heller, Chair of the Middle East Crisis Committee commented: “This horrific
loss of life was ignored for six years until the US Ambassador to the UN
appeared on ’60 Minutes’ and admitted the deaths of half a million children …
We in the Middle East Crisis Committee call for May 12th to be marked as Iraq
Genocide Memorial Day.” (ii)
Iraq’s
children of course, continued to die at an average of six thousand a month
until the illegal 2003 invasion wrought further apocalyptic disaster. Currently
many hospitals are assessed as even more woeful than under the embargo, thus
they continue to die in a near forgotten tragedy of UN-US-UK making. Soaring
cancers and birth deformities linked to weapons used in the 1991 bombings,
twelve years of subsequent bombings, 2003 and the following years have
exacerbated and compounded a tragedy of enormity.
As
others accused of crimes against humanity and the peace end up at the
International Criminal Court (but so far, only if black or Eastern European, it
seems) Albright gathers a bizarre collection of “humanitarian” awards.
One
of the strangest is surely the Freedom Award from the International Rescue
Committee, initiated by Albert Einstein which: “responds to the world’s worst
humanitarian crises and helps people survive and rebuild their lives (offering)
life saving care and life-changing assistance …”
Endorsing
infanticide hardly falls within the IRC’s lofty stated aspirations.
Two
years after her statement on disposable children, Albright, now having
abandoned further tarnishing the United Nations fine founding aspirations, to
become US Secretary of State, declared (February 1998) : “Iraq is a long way
from (here), but what happens there matters a great deal here. For the risks
that the leaders of a rogue state will use nuclear, chemical or biological
weapons against us or our allies is the greatest security threat we face.”
A
year later, the 1999 razing of much of the Balkans became known as “Madeleine’s
war.” The largely unrecognized nation of Kosova, carved from that decimation is
now rated one of the most corrupt and lawless countries in the region and high
in world ranking, according to December 2011 findings by Transparency
International.
Talking
after the virtual destruction of Iraq as a nation state, it’s records,
government institutions bombed, looted, stolen, she told Jim Lehrer in
September 2003: “ … I think we actually … kept him (Saddam Hussein) in a
strategic box. We bombed very much if you remember all the maps, always in
terms of North and South ~ covers a great portion of Iraq. I think we had him
in the box.” (iii) No mention that both the
bombing and the “box” were comprehensively illegal.
As
ever, the majority of “bombed” victims were Iraq’s children for whom her
contempt was seemingly boundless: small rural shepherds and goat herders
tending the family flocks on the vast flat tundra, with no place to hide.
One
politician with whom she had sparred did take a stand in vast contrast. Robin
Cook, Britain’s Foreign Secretary resigned in protest two days before the
invasion. His resignation speech in Parliament on 18th March 2003 was a searing
indictment of stark double standards on dealing with Iraq. Deliberate selective
perception which could now equally apply to threats to Iran:
“I
have heard it said that Iraq has had not months but twelve years in which to
complete disarmament, and that our patience is exhausted”, he began.
“Yet
it is more than thirty years since (UN) Resolution 242 called on Israel to withdraw
from the occupied territories.
“We
do not express the same impatience with the persistent refusal of Israel to
comply.”
He talked of: “ … the strong sense of injustice throughout the Muslim world at what it sees as one rule for the allies of the US and another rule for the rest.”
Britain’s credibility was not: “helped by the appearance that our partners in Washington are less interested in disarmament than they are in regime change in Iraq.
“That
explains why any evidence that inspections may be showing progress is greeted
in Washington not with satisfaction but with consternation: it reduces the case
for war.
George Soros in drag? NO! Just Albright resembling another NWO criminal, George Soros in this photograph.
And
as applies to Iran now, he pleaded that: “Inspections be given a chance (and
that the UK was) “being pushed too quickly into conflict by a US Administration
with an agenda of its own.
He
asked for the halt of: “commitment of troops in a war that has neither
international agreement nor domestic support” and ended: “I intend to join
those tomorrow night who will vote against military action. It is for that
reason alone, and with a heavy heart, that I resign from the government.” (iv)
On
the first anniversary of the invasion he stated in Parliament: “It seems only
too likely that the judgment of history may be that the invasion of Iraq has
been the biggest blunder in British foreign and security policy in the half
century since Suez.
“In
truth we would have made more progress in rolling back support for terrorism if
we had brought peace to Palestine rather than war to Iraq.”
Robin
Cook died of a heart complication whilst hill walking on remote Ben Stack in
Scotland, coincidentally within a swathe of land owned by the Duke of
Westminster, a Major General and at the time Assistant Chief of Defence Staff,
who visited British held Basra a number of times after the invasion.
His
death was on the 6th August, 2005, Hiroshima Day and the fifteenth anniversary
of the imposition of the all denying embargo on Iraq. A price Robin Cook had
clearly not thought “worth it.”
It
has to be hoped that Iraq Genocide Memorial Day spreads worldwide both in
memory of those abandoned by the inspiring words committed to in the UN
Charter, the numerous hidden casualties, dead and alive ~ and as a reminder
that for a great swathe of the world, mortifyingly, it is the West which
appears to be increasingly despotic.
Also
see Felicity Arbutnot: “The Children of Iraq ‘ Was the Price Worth it?”
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=30760
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=30760
Albright: a face as hard as hell. Where she's headed.
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